I started my animation off with the main charcter walking on from the left of the screen.
He follows a path over the first 160 frames and then sits down.
When I watch the animation "real time" using the play button, and when I render out using Final mode, the end result as I would expect.

However, if I turn on toon lines as a render option, after the first frame has rendered, my main character appears in the middle of the set, continuing his walk cycle on the spot, no longer constrained to the path.

I'm using A:M 11.1a on Windows XP- has anyone else encountered problems when using "toon lines" render?



example 1: character is constrained to a path for 160 frames:
[attachmentid=11082]

example 2: character appears in place in realtime at frame 29:
[attachmentid=11083]

example 3: character out of place at frame 25 in toon render mode:
[attachmentid=11084]

You might want to update your version of AM as a first step:

http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showforum=2

I'm using v11 which requires the original CD in the drive.
If I upgrade to v12 would I need a v12 disk?
(a friend of mine has an old v8.5 disk and couldn't get v10 to work after upgrading though I don't know if this has any relevance!)

If I install v12 can I still use my v11 disk to make it run?

You're correct about needing the v12 CD to run v12. But you should at least be running v11.1i, which is the final v11 version.

ftp://ftp.hash.com/pub/updates/windows/am2004/11.1

I tried v11.1i but the results appear to be the same.
Has anyone else had a problem with toon render?

Any luck with this one?

Rodney

I just tried a very simple case of object on path for 12 frames (11.1i pc) - and yes I get a weird effect when I render with toon lines - object does not follow path correctly with toon lines (frame 1 is out of sequence) - but does follow correctly when toon lines are not used.

I'm not sure if this artifact still shows up in ver 12 or 13 - someone else would have to try - and report it to A:MReports

My problem is the exact reverse of this!
The very first frame of any render is fine, and all subsequent frames are incorrect - and it doesn't matter whether I render the full movie, or select a frame range. (e.g. if I render frames 1200 onwards, then frame 1200 is ok, but my character appears in the wrong place for every frame after that).
It doesn't matter whether I render to a movie (qt/mpg) or tga sequence.

Curious - my only solution so far has to been render each frame individually, one at a time! (I'm up to frame 408 of a 4,200 frame animation) If I had the same problem as Nancy, I'd be ok - I'd just render to a tga sequence and bin the first frame!

Just as a note - I was rendering frames 0-12.. so frame 0 was correct, frame 1 incorrect, frames 2-12 correct. I also noticed the problem could be intermittent. Most of the time it was wrong.

My guess is that what I experienced and what you experience are related ... somehow rendering toon lines is clobbering something in memory that the path computation needs.

For you however - Have you tried splitting your choreography up into 2 or more different chors? - (4800 frames in 1 chor sounds crazy!)

That is: isolate your path sequence (160 frames) into 1 chor and put the rest into other smaller chors - so that there is no path computation going on. And yes, render to tgas instead & reassemble later. You probably then wouldn't have to render each frame separately.

I don't know what else to suggest - I feel your pain.